En radikalt pragmatisk redogörelser för villkorssatser
Forskningsprojekt
Projektet syftar ytterst till att förstå tankar som uttrycks i satser av formen "Om P, Q". Frågan är hur dessa kan uttrycka en rad radikalt men ändå tydligt avgränsade olika relationer mellan P och Q.
Satser av formen "om P, Q" kan uttrycka en mängd olika relationer: relationer av (kausal, epistemisk, logisk, etc) följd, oberoende och relevans mellan P och Q, men också relationer mellan talakter uttryckta med P respektive Q ("om jag får säga det själv så var festen riktigt lyckad"). Samtidigt går de flesta relationer som kan råda mellan P och Q inte att uttrycka med dessa satser. Projektet försöker förstå detta fenomen och de tankar som uttrycks med olika villkorssatser utifrån observationen att diverse pragmatiska faktorer påverkar vilken relation en villkorssats tycks uttrycka i en viss situation.
Projektöversikt
Projektperiod:
2013-01-29 –
2014-12-31
Medverkande institutioner och enheter vid Umeå universitet
One of the more puzzling and philosophically important locutions is the English conditional “if” and cognates in other languages. Conditional thinking and expressions of conditional thoughts are central to scientific and more generally rational enterprises, and figure prominently in philosophical analyses of various concepts and phenomena, making the theory of conditionals methodologically important. Moreover, sentences of the form “if P, Q” are capable of conveying a wide variety of seemingly dissimilar contents. They are capable of conveying relations of consequence (causal, epistemic, logical, etc), independence, relevance, and perspective taking between P and Q, but also relations between P and some illocutionary act performed by uttering Q ("If I may toot my own horn, our group made the transition months ago"). At the same time, this wide variety of expressible contents seems highly constrained. Though the list of relations that can be easily and naturally expressed using such sentences is long, most possible relations between propositions cannot be expressed by simple conditionals: (not relations of contrariety or mere probability raising, for example). The problem is to understand the conventional contribution of “if” and how it interacts with contextual and pragmatic factors to determine the variety of contents conveyed by particular conditionals as well as constraints on these contents.
In this project, I develop a radically pragmatic account of if-conditionals, arguing that the conventional contribution is restricted to introducing the antecedent without presenting it as true, such that the consequent can be understood “in relation to it”, where the relevant relation is determined pragmatically in the context of utterance.
